Consider, page-17

I’m making assumptions as well, ones that limit the pearls as much as possible. I was thinking that they deploy into some sort of mesh where every pearl can talk to three others for service redundancy, etc. if they are all in a string and one quits then the string is broken. In a mesh then they just go around the broken node.

If that’s somewhat correct and they are on five orbits then they could go around in a grid five wide and four long. If 200 give fully redundant 24x7 then 20 would give fully redundant 2.4 hours.

Obviously I have no idea how they will deploy the 20. Maybe they go three deep and seven or eight long, expanding the latitudes with later launches. This would give them maybe four or so hours of redundant service over a narrower land mass.

They’ll tell us when they tell us. It depends, I suppose, on which customers are ready to go first. The sats will orbit to their advantage you would think.